At UC Berkeley, Steven collaborated for many years with a group from
Paola S. Timiras’s lab, on the role that caloric restriction plays in
maintaining estrogen receptor-alpha and IGH-1 receptor immunoreactivity in
various nuclei of the mouse hypothalamus.

Steven was also the director of the Aging Research Centre, and is a
leading scientist in the field of aging research. His numerous
publications, include articles on systems biology, the effects of caloric
restriction on the mouse hypothalamus, and on the Automated Imaging
Microscope System (AIMS). He is best known for the coining of word "Phenomics",
which was defined in an abstract titled: Phenomics:
a new direction for the study of neuroendocrine aging, that was
published in the journal Experimental
Gerontology.

Steven was the lead scientist that developed the AIMS system along with
Warren Freitag, Jason Neudorf, and members of the UC Berkeley lab where
AIMS was developed and utilized. Many journals articles have been published
about the system and the results that it produced. Since the completion of
the first version in 1998, newer versions were developed, with the final
version being completed in 2007.

Empowering investigators to accurately count specific cell populations
is essential to all fields of neurobiology. While computer assisted
counting technology has been in use for over a decade, advances in an
Automated Imaging Microscope System (AIMS), now insure 97% accuracy when
comparing computer counts to human counts for both nuclear and cytoplasmic
stained tissue.

More importantly, regional analysis can now be customized so that only
cell populations within specified anatomic regions will be targeted for
counting, thus reducing the background noise of non-immunoreactive cells
when characterizing specific cell populations. This application was
recently used to successfully map the density and distribution of both
nuclear expressed estrogen receptor-alpha and cytoplasmicly expressed IGF-1
receptor in specific hypothalamic nuclei.

Furthermore, AIMS can now detect intra-hypothalamic differences in
receptor expression and can measure phenomenon such as lateralization. By
using this technology, the evaluation of tissue-level biology can be used
to establish neuroendocrine biomarkers of aging, and analyze the
neuroendocrine effects of caloric restriction and gene knockout models that
extend the lifespan.

The mission of CREA
is to investigate the basic processes that cause aging, with the goal of
improving and extending human health span. CREA integrates the efforts of
cell and molecular biologists, structural and computational biologists,
geneticists, physiologists, and public health professionals, who are the
intellectual assets and resources of the University of California, Berkeley
and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.